and clever, and depraved," dragging the lover to the sea, and the
nut-brown maid holding him back. Angelina, of the "Rose and the
Ring," is the Becky of childhood; she is fair, and the good Rosalba
is brune. In writing "Pendennis" he had a singular experience. He
looked over his own "back numbers," and found "a passage which I had
utterly forgotten as if I had never read or written it." In
Lockhart's "Life of Scott," James Ballantyne says that "when the
'Bride of Lammermoor' was first put into his hands in a complete
shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or
conversation it contained." That is to say, he remembered nothing
of his own invention, though his memory of the traditional parts was
as clear as ever. Ballantyne remarks, "The history of the human
mind contains nothing more wonderful." The experience of Thackeray
is a parallel to that of Scott. "Pendennis," it must be noted, was
interrupted by a severe illness, and "The Bride of Lammermoor" was
dictated by Sir Walter when in great physical pain. On one occasion
Thackeray "lit upon a very stupid part of 'Pendennis,' I am sorry to
say; and yet how well written it is! What a shame the author don't
write a complete good story! Will he die before doing so? or come
back from America and do it?"

Did he ever write "a complete, good story"? Did any one ever do
such a thing as write a three-volume, novel, or a novel of equal
length, which was "a complete, good story"? Probably not; or if any
mortal ever succeeded in the task, it was the great Alexander Dumas.
"The Three Musketeers," I take leave to think, and "Twenty Years
After," are complete good stories, good from beginning to end,
stories from beginning to end without a break, without needless
episode. Perhaps one may say as much for "Old Mortality," and for
"Quentin Durward." But Scott and Dumas were born story-tellers;